More sales and better return on marketing investment delivered at a sustainable marketing cost increase—this is the exciting challenge that last-minute travel leader L’TUR approached us with in order to bring our partnership and their programmatic display advertising strategy to the next level. Challenge accepted: we couldn’t wait to help L’TUR take better advantage of its rich data assets.

The first goal was to better understand how L’TUR users plan and book online. We had already captured interesting booking insights in our consumer travel research conducted in 2014, but working with L’TUR’s online marketing and business intelligence teams helped us uncover more specific details about how soon before the planned departure date L’TUR users usually book.

These insights combined with L’TUR’s proprietary booking curve enabled us to develop a data-driven segmentation strategy for better targeting and improved budget efficiency. This new campaign segmentation allowed L’TUR to reach their users at the very moment that they are most likely to book, and to optimize L’TUR’s investments in order to focus on the most relevant segments.

“Data is what fuels travel marketing today,” says Rüdiger Peters, Director eCommerce at L’TUR. “Combined with programmatic buying and programmatic messaging, data can improve our personalized customer approach and efficient budget allocation. In Sociomantic we have found and expert to help us exactly target our user groups based on their travel plans. This enhances the booking experience for our customers and hence our online business.”

Samir Reinert, Sr. Sales Manager Travel at Sociomantic, explains further: “Although travel marketers do have the most powerful data right at their fingertips, many of them still don’t fully exploit the countless opportunities this brings for online marketing. Booking data, revenue management, loyalty programs, web analytics, CRM—these data assets give deep insights into users’ travel plans and booking preferences and help marketers to provide travelers with the right offer at the right time with relevant up- or cross-selling opportunities.”

The importance of data in travel marketing was also one of the big topics at the fvw Online Marketing Day, where we were invited to present the case study on stage, together with L’TUR Performance Marketing Team Lead Anja Köster. The event inspired German travel marketers with insights from all corners of the online marketing discipline, including multi-device, customer journey, social media and search strategies.

One of the event highlights was the fvw Online Marketing Award ceremony. Congratulations to the winners at Hamburg Tourismus and their outstanding travel app! We are honored that we got to support such industry-leading excellence as a jury-member of this high-level travel marketing award.

Smart data integration, personalization, and mobile are the topics keep our travel clients up at night these days, and keep us up by extension. This was proven not only the fvw Online Marketing Day, but also the EyeforTravel summit at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona and the eTravel World conference at ITB Berlin earlier this month. Sociomantic was invited to speak at both events and we are excited to see that the travel industry is steering the course towards a more user-centric, data-driven online marketing approach.

Download the full case study to see what’s already possible today, learn more about L’TUR’s data approach and get insights into how Sociomantic will help it expand its programmatic display strategy to the full funnel.